Serving Private Content through CloudFront

Many companies that distribute content via the internet want to restrict access to
documents, business data, media streams, or content
that is intended for selected users, for example, users who have paid a fee. To
securely serve this private content using CloudFront, you can
do the following:

Require that your users access your private content by using special CloudFront signed
URLs or signed cookies.

Require that your users access your Amazon S3 content using CloudFront URLs, not Amazon
S3 URLs. Requiring CloudFront URLs isn't required, but we recommend it to
prevent users from bypassing the restrictions that you specify in signed URLs
or signed cookies.

Overview of Private Content

You can control user access to your private content in two ways, as shown in the following
illustration:

Restrict access to objects in CloudFront edge caches

Restrict access to objects in your Amazon S3 bucket

Restricting Access to Objects in CloudFront Edge Caches

You can configure CloudFront to require that users access your objects using either
signed URLs or
signed cookies. You then develop your application either to create and distribute signed URLs to
authenticated users or to send Set-Cookie headers that set signed cookies on the viewers for authenticated users.
(To give a few users long-term access to a limited number of objects, you can
also create signed URLs manually.)

When you create signed URLs or signed cookies to control access to your objects, you
can specify the following restrictions:

An ending date and time, after which the URL is no longer valid.

(Optional) The date and time that the URL becomes valid.

(Optional) The IP address or range of addresses of the computers that can be used
to access your content.

One part of a signed URL or a signed cookie is hashed and signed using the private
key from a public/private key pair. When someone uses a
signed URL or signed cookie to access an object, CloudFront compares the signed
and unsigned portions of the URL or cookie. If they don't
match, CloudFront doesn't serve the object.

Restricting Access to Objects in Amazon S3 Buckets

You can optionally secure the content in your Amazon S3 bucket so users can access
it through CloudFront but cannot access it directly by using Amazon S3 URLs.
This prevents anyone from bypassing CloudFront and using the Amazon S3 URL to
get content that you want to restrict access to. This step isn't required
to use signed URLs, but we recommend it.

To require that users access your content through CloudFront URLs, you perform the
following tasks:

Create a special CloudFront user called an origin access identity.

Give the origin access identity permission to read the objects in your bucket.

Remove permission for anyone else to use Amazon S3 URLs to read the objects.

Using an HTTP Server for Private Content

You can use signed URLs or signed cookies for any CloudFront distribution, regardless
of whether the origin is an Amazon S3 bucket or an HTTP server.
However, for CloudFront to get your objects from an HTTP server, the objects must
remain publicly accessible. When the objects are publicly
accessible, anyone who has the URL for an object on your HTTP server can access
the object without logging in or paying for your content.
If you use signed URLs or signed cookies and your origin is an HTTP server, do
not give the URLs for the objects on your HTTP server to
your customers or to others outside your organization.